Review: LG Versa

The world of mobile phones divides into two camps: touch screens and non-touch screens. Lately though, there is an emerging new faction, phones that have both. The Versa by LG and Verizon falls into that tertiary classification. But wait, in addition to the attachable keyboard there's an available slide-out game controller. How do they work?

Hit the jump to find out and for something completely different.

The LG Versa is a slick little device. Not only is it a full touch screen, but as I mentioned before it has a few available strap-on accessories like the QWERTY keyboard and gaming controller.

The keyboard functions as you would expect, but the downside is that they keys just barely eke out above the keypad and press in too stiffly. Sometimes I couldn't tell if I pressed a key or not because the press was so stiff and shallow as well. I spent most of my review time with the Versa with the keyboard attached because typing on the 3" touch screen is an exercise in patience for my big thumbed brethren and I, and I don't like to exert myself any more than I have to.

A nice touch on the keyboards, both virtual and physical, is that they have dedicated "@" and ".com" keys making emails and tweets incredibly easy to send. Why Blackberry devices don't have these seemingly no-brainer additions is beyond me.

The WTF Factor

This is the rating system all of my test gadgets are judged upon. Not an exact measurement by any means, but there are always going to be things that tick me off or make me ask "WTF is wrong with this?" or "WTF doesn't it do this?" The lower the score the better.

What is cool about the keyboard though is that it folds over the screen when attached and classes the phone up a bit with a faux leather texture. The keyboard attachment features an outer display that allows you to dial the last number in your calls history without opening it. I would have liked to have been able to scroll through the list with the volume rocker like on other Verizon phones I've used, though.

The gaming controller functions as advertised, Pac-man controls entirely better with the controller than with touch controls. Sadly, the gaming controller also turns the Versa into a brick. The phone starts out at a lithe .54" wide, but slapping the gaming controller on balloons the phone to over an inch thick.

But this brings me to a larger issue: a glut of the games on available on Verizon's store are shoddy ports and half-assed attempts at games with a big-name license slapped on them to unabashedly take your money.

Maybe when the V-Cast App Store launches with a more diverse line-up of content created by a larger development community later this fall we'll see more of what the iPhone is enjoying: games tailored to a mobile device's strengths as opposed to barely passable tripe like Call of Duty: World at War. The game consists of little more than a 16-bit sprite running around shooting slightly yellow 16-bit sprites. Really. That's the extent of it.

Will a Verizon phone get its own version of Rolando or Flight Control? Who knows. But, if and when it does, you can bet you'll steer clear of a gaming controller to play either.

As for the phone itself, it's basically an LG Dare with a few tweaks. The OS features multiple "faces" for the background, each with a corresponding different background image allowing users to assign as many as ten shortcuts per each of the four pages.

The Versa has a neat transitional effect for screen actions like a page turn animation when unlocking the phone, but the web browsing experience on the phone is akin to that of the LG Voyager: barely passable.

For what the Versa is--a quick messaging phone with a few cool tweaks--it'll work great for just that, but don't expect a whole lot more from it.